Entity Framework 4 Tips for WinForms Development

I've been recently working on a smart client (WinForms) application backed by Entitiy Framework 4 (EF4) on Visual Studio 2010. In this blog post I will try to give you some tips regarding some limitations and points to be careful about EF4.

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One of the features introduced in Entity Framework is being database independent. Which mean each database provider can support Entity Framework by implementing its provider.

This feature allows you build applications independent from the underplaying database provider. In this post I'm going to show how to build an application that support multiple databases using same conceptual model made by Entity Framework.

With .NET 4.0 right around the corner, I thought it would be cool to download Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 and start playing around with the next release of Entity Framework.

The initial release of Entity Framework came with a great deal of criticism. To make matters worse, there was a large uproar when it was rumored that Microsoft would be abandoning LINQ to SQL, in favor of Entity Framework. This was because, at the time, many developers felt Entity Framework was an inferior technology to LINQ to SQL. To set things right, Microsoft proactively moved forward with improving Entity Framework, in time for the 4.0 release of the .NET Framework. This is good news because my initial impressions, so far, have been nothing but positive.

I did not play much with Dynamic Data controls in VS2008 and just made a cool discovery in VS2010 Beta 2. This may not even be new, but as I'm sitting 30,000+ feet over the Atlantic ocean, I don't have access to VS2008 at the moment to check.

Julie Lerman shows database administrators how to limit access to databases from the Entity Framework by allowing it to work only with views and stored procedures instead of tables-without impacting application code or alienating developers.

Elisa Flasko takes you through a sample weblog application to demonstrate how new improvements in Entity Framework and WCF Data Services work together to simplify the way data is modeled, consumed and produced in Visual Studio 2010.

This article is the third in a series about n-tier programming with the Entity Framework, specifically about building custom Web services with the Entity Framework and WCF. This article looks at features coming in the second release of the Entity Framework (EF4) and how you use them to implement the Self-Tracking Entities and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) n-tier patterns.

This article examines n-tier patterns for success and some of the key APIs and issues specific to the Entity Framework. It also provides a sneak peak at features coming in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 that should make n-tier development significantly easier.

The .NET Compact Framework can be used to write great code and great applications. As long as you take a few things into consideration and are willing to bend a rule or two, you can have your performance cake and eat it too. In this article the authors present some neat tricks to make life as a programmer easier when using the .NET Compact Framework. Later they discuss techniques to increase performance, and decrease both load time and memory footprints. Sample code is provided.

What is Entity Framework?ADO.NET Entity Framework is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for the .NET Framework. Basically it represents the relational (logical) schema of the data that is stored in a database and presents its conceptual schema